On 5/3/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Tell me this, please. Is there *anyone* in the world who would walk up to a friend and say - hey did you hear the news about [string of hex digits]?
Ahem. Existence proof follows:
Just 20 hours or so ago, I did precisely this; after having gone to the trouble to create a mnemnonic with pseudo-occult undertones, to ease memorisation.
Now; this only provides a counter-example to the precise wording of your stipulation. It proves that *someone* (me) _would_ do so. In the actual case I did *not* go through it, because my friends interrupted me in the process, wanting to first know what the number was, and hearing that it was "illegal information" we had a full and frank discussion about the morality (or otherwise) of merely speaking the number outloud in a bar. So it does not precisely logically speaking prove that someone *has* done so.
Note, by the way, that these folks I was meeting with at the time were specifically people with a strong interest in all video formats (a regular meeting of scifi/horror movie buffs) and who do infact swap such and lend between each other (won't stipulate whether anyone of them privately circumvents any or all copy protection or otherwise engages in illegal copying).
On the larger issue though (as the above is largely beside the point from wikipedian purposes) I think we can easily have our cake and eat it too. Let's not be at the forefront, but not laggards either. A family friend once gave his opinion about how to best get along with ones army troop; never be first at anything, and never be last either. There is no need for us to blaze the trail on this particular issue or any like it, but we can and should confidently saunter forward on it, once the elephants have passed through and trampled a nice solid path, clearing the bush in their wake.
It is nearly inevitable that this is going to be a case where all MPAA's horses won't be able to put humpty dumpty back together again, and after it becomes definitively obvious that is the case of affairs, and the number indeed has spread far, wide and into authoritative information outlets, we can safely go with the de facto non-enforcement of what rights (or not, as the case may in the de jure sense have been) MPAA might have had to prevent disclosure.
-- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]